Re: [exim] Moving Exim from Solaris to Linux

On Mon, 2012-10-01 at 12:58 +0000, Graham Butler wrote:
> We are currently looking at replacing our Solaris boxes with a flavour of Linux to run Exim with a focus on Red Hat and Ubuntu. I am trying to collect some evidence to which OS is being used to run EXIM and why, before we make a decision. Could you please respond by sending me, or the list, information on which OS you are using to run EXIM and any information on why your decided to run it on that particular platform.
>
> I am also asking other list for similar information on Squid, BIND, Apache, etc.......

To paraphrase a recent tech saying: you're looking at it wrong.

Choose the OS because you/your team have the skills and experience to
manage it, rather than because it comes with specific packages
available.

In $dayjob at Loughborough University we're a CentOS shop now for most
of our web/MTA and associated systems, principally because we've gone
through RedHat's line of products from the original RedHat 5 (No! not
RHEL 5, but RedHat Linux 5 back in the mid-late 90s).

Firstly we ran everything on HP-UX, then on Solaris, then on RedHat 5
then 6 then 7 then 8 then 9, then Fedora until that became too
"brittle" (and fast moving) after which we had a short dalliance with
RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 but found the update entitlement system an awkward
thing to manage, so we switched to CentOS 5 and now deploy all our Linux
systems on CentOS 6.

There are some oddities dotted about; some Debian boxes, some Ubuntu
boxes, and one archaic Caldera Linux box which we almost keep running
out of a desire to see how long one single-cpu, single-PSU box can run
for!

Exim has compiled successfully on every single one (we prefer to roll
our own rather than rely on backported system updates).

Graeme